Leading Lights awards deadline moves

The Big 5G Event – our usual location and occasion to announce the year's Leading Lights winners – has moved. That event will now take place in late September in Austin, Texas.

With the event postponement and several companies adapting to a new way of working in the era of COVID-19, we're also going to move the Leading Lights awards deadlines as well. The new deadline for Leading Lights entries is midnight PST on Friday, May 1.

This year our audience needs more than the usual amount of time to work through approvals processes, unpredictable executive changes and last-minute panic-writing. We didn't anticipate offering any more deadline extensions, but this year has been such a kick in the teeth already that we thought it was only fair to push this one thing back another month.

Here is an updated list of important dates for the Leading Lights awards:

May 1: All Leading Lights awards entries and Light Reading Hall of Fame nominations are due. No exceptions.

June 2020: We will publish the shortlist of finalists on Light Reading. In the weeks following, we'll publish a series of blog posts on Light Reading discussing the merits of the nominees and what stood out about the entries and convinced us to include them among the finalists.

September 22: We'll announce this year's Leading Lights winners at our annual banquet, held in Austin, Texas, the night before The Big 5G Event opens its doors.

And here is a list of important facts about the Leading Lights awards process:

The main part of your awards submission still has a 300-word limit. This is not an April Fools bit. We're serious.

Products, services and strategic directives must have been announced on or after March 1, 2019, to qualify for consideration. We're not moving that date, only the awards entry deadline.

Even though this year has already been a tough one, the adoption of 5G is still accelerating worldwide and every other part of the network is evolving incredibly quickly to accommodate more bandwidth, new services and, perhaps, an entirely new way of working. We look forward to digging in and reading this year's Leading Lights submissions and seeing just how much effort and innovation are still propelling the industry forward.